iRiver tablet

Once upon a time a company called iRiver made a name for itself with a line of MP3 players and portable media players. In fact I still have an old iRiver MP3 player lying around which I still use from time to time as a voice recorder thanks to its support for line and mic input. But while iRiver never exactly went away, the company has largely faded into the background after the launch of the iPod touch and iPhone.

Now it looks like iRiver might be ready to take the same plunge that nearly everyone else is taking to combat Apple. The company appears to be working on an Android tablet.

Netbook News spotted a picture of the tablet on a Korean blog (although the photo was snapped at an event in China). The device apparently has a 1 GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, and runs Android 2.2. While that doens’t make the iRiver tablet the most exciting device on the horizon, it does mean that the tablet probably won’t be very expensive.

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4 replies on “iRiver Android tablet spotted in China”

  1. This better be cheap, and that screen better not be as much crap as it looks.  They’ve got last year’s ‘that’s slightly coolness’ inside powering the thing and no other information, so it’s hard to get too excited.

    But go iRiver!  I had several of there products before hopping on the mothership bandwagon in the form of the 80gb iPod (which I still have).  Then again as I recall I bought the iPod despite grumbling about how expensive it was because I figured that paying more upfront for something that worked and didn’t break every six months was better than constantly being forced to ‘upgrade’ if I dropped the damn thing on something harder than a pillow.

  2. What I want is one of these manufacturers to do is copy the Nook Touch,  but in a 10″-11″ version, with a basic Android OS (at least 2.1) on it. No need for audio, video, custom apps, or writing pens.  Just make sure certain reading apps will run on it including EZ-PDF. That is it, and plenty will buy.

    1. You want a dead minimum of Froyo (2.2)…  they redid the Dalvik engine for that and performance got a lot faster…  but otherwise it’s a fairly decent idea. 

      I have to agree that it seems like so many companies are either too busy trying to ‘customize’ Android or ‘stand out’ by adding sometimes questionable features, that no one seems to be concentrating on delivering a real baseline product with quality parts.

      Well maybe Samsung with it’s original Tab, the new one looks nice as well but they may be focusing too much on being Thin…  Acer tried and I would argue failed with the Icona (questionable build quality/over priced).  The Asus Transformer is a tad gimmicky but close to what you want, and frankly the dock option IS cool.  The Xoom had a small window to hit and seem like it largely failed (Price/honeycomb teething problems)…  The Playbook…  well.  The HP TouchPad is something I’d like to believe in but I’ve been burned by webOS and it’s lack of developers before.  You already took a shot at the HTC Flyer.

      So, yeah.  There probably is room in that market for a no frills tablet made from quality off the shelf components (cheap TN panels that are either resistive, or require too much signal to detect a screen hit need not apply…  You can include inaccurate sensors on that list too… So basically everything except the Tegra2 on the gTablet by Viewsonic), and absolutely no custom software.

      I keep hoping that the Archos tablets will hit this rather modest target but there always seems to be something wrong with them, but then I didn’t get to actually PLAY with the last generation since both no one I knew bought one and the local stores didn’t stock them…  But basically the reviewers of the products on NewEgg seem to be, on the whole, less than impressed…

      We’ll see maybe that product will come out…  Maybe Archos is already making it, and I’ll get to use one hands on to verify…  But yeah.

      Seriously though if all you want to do is read some documents, the Kobo Touch is pretty sweet, I got to play with one, and even hack it before returning it, and it was very responsive and easy to play with.  Or you could just, you know, buy a Nook Color and live with a good but slightly small screen.

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